Gettin’ the Go-Ahead (Tiny House Part 1)

It’s 35 days until our wedding, and Judah and I are building a house. Or rather, Judah is building it and I’m wistfully watching from 150 miles away (and helping whenever I can make the trip). Are we crazy? Yeah. But that’s nothing new…

I will be documenting the process of building our home here on the blog! Here’s part 1.

Inspections, permits, and lots of mud

Even though our house will be moveable and less than 450 square feet, we still had to go through the process of getting the land set up and inspected as if we were building a “regular” house.

Before that could happen, we had to reroute the water and electric lines. On December 17th (2016) we rented a trencher and Judah used that while I cleaned off the concrete runners (this site was set up for a house trailer, so there are two parallel concrete runners under where our house will be).

The house site before trenching

The trencher and Judah’s two lovely trucks 😉

My favorite person doing an awesome job with the trencher

Here you can see the concrete runners and one of the trenches

I thought it was beyond awesome that I got to be there with Judah as we broke the ground for the first time to build our house. I’ve always loved stories of the pioneers, and I can still hardly believe that Judah and I are building our first house together. There’s something so wholesome and wonderful about that.

It wasn’t all wonderful, however… later that day before we had a chance to finish the job it started raining. We worked in the rain for a while. And then it got dark. So we worked in the rain and the dark for a while. But eventually we stopped, discouraged and maybe a bit frustrated because we hadn’t planned things out very well.

 

Two very wet and muddy people – smiling because we’re together

In the following weeks, everything passed inspection. The septic inspection took forever, though, leaving us hanging a couple weeks before we could even apply for a building permit. Once we passed the septic inspection, the permit took just a day to acquire. Judah got it yesterday! *cue confetti and party noisemakers*

Then Judah was free to buy supplies and start hammering! (as he would say) I shall spare you a picture of the precarious truck and trailer loaded with supplies, but here is a piece of wisdom: don’t bite off more than you can chew. You may be left driving home at less than 30 mph because you bought more than your rig can handle well.

Isn’t life such a neat adventure? I’m so thankful for the path God is leading us down. And I’m especially thankful for my man and how he’s building this house for us! Stay tuned for part 2!